Chrome won't apply css hover style when left mouse button is held down

In Google Chrome, the CSS hover state isn't being triggered when the left mouse button is held down, as shown here:

a:hover {
  color: red;   
}

<a href="http://www.jsfiddle.net">words</a>

http://jsfiddle.net/RHGG6/1/

This issue doesn't occur in either FF8 or IE9. It's problematic because I'm implementing a drag-and-drop action and using CSS to highlight the drop target. I could do this pretty trivially in JavaScript, but that seems heavy-handed for what is essentially a CSS problem. Are there any workarounds to this?